The Atlantic Wire has an article about Barnes & Noble’s new e-book reader, the Nook. It’s an interesting looking product; I’m quite curious to see one, though I’m quite happy with my Kindle.
Category Archives: Books
Amazing Clarity
While I was in Portland for the Tcl/Tk Conference, I naturally went to Powell’s books; and given my current interest, I raided the theology shelves. One of the books I found, with glee, was Frank Sheed’s Theology for Beginners.
I discover authors in two ways: sometimes I’ll just pick something up while browsing, and sometimes I’ll go looking for something because I’ve seen positive mentions from a number of different sources. And sometimes in the latter case, the book or author in question is hard to get a hold of. In Sheed’s case, I’d seen him mentioned by a number of writers whom I’ve come to trust, but I simply never found any of his books at the bookstore, and (having lots of other books to read first) never got sufficiently motivated to look on-line. Besides, there’s the thrill of the chase: it’s fun to hunt for things.
So anyway, I found it at Powell’s, read a few pages, and snapped it up, along with Sheed’s Theology and Sanity (which I’ve not yet read). And I am singularly impressed.
First of all, Sheed writes with the clarity of C.S. Lewis. It’s a clarity he earned, speaking and fielding questions in Hyde Park, and learning how to get across to all kinds of people. Second, where Lewis was inclined to emphasize “Mere” Christianity in his writings, Sheed is trying to convey the richness of Catholic Christianity in all of its fullness—and he does so clearly, thoroughly, and not at all dryly. Many things that I’ve come to understand in dribs and drabs over the last two years are all laid out neatly and in order. The book is fifty years old (and thus pre-dates Vatican II) but except for a handful of references to details of the Latin Mass it doesn’t feel dated at all.
Lewis famously described Christianity as a house with many rooms, and “Mere” Christianity a description of the whole house, or perhaps of the hallway between the rooms. If you’re a fan of C.S. Lewis you’re curious what they believe in the Catholic room, you could hardly do better than start this one book (which, I’ve just discovered, is available from Amazon).
He Leadeth Me
In the time leading up to World War II, Fr. Walter Ciszek, an American priest, was trained in the Byzantine Rite, with the intent of travelling to Russia as a missionary. The war intervened, and Fr. Ciszek was posted to Poland. In the course of things Poland was occupied by Russian forces. The Russians were recruiting laborers to work in the Urals, and Fr. Ciszek and two other priests presented themselves (in civvies, of course) as a way of moving closer to their shared goal.
Things did not go as they had planned; the other laborers were afraid to talk about matters of faith, and then Ciszek was arrested as a Vatican spy. He spent years in the Lubianka prison in Moscow, and more years as a prisoner in labor camps, before he was finally able to return to the United States. In all, he spent twenty-three years in Soviet Russia. In that time, the only thing that sustained him was his faith in God. Or, more accurately, God sustained him.
Ciszek wrote two books about his experiences. The first, With God in Russia, is a thick, detailed account of everything that happened to him and everything he did. The second, the thinner He Leadeth Me, covers the facts quickly and at a high level, and focusses on the movements of Ciszek’s own soul, and the spiritual lessons he learned while in Russia. Most of these, not surprisingly, concern trust in God and what it means to accept His will.
Of the two, He Leadeth Me is the book I usually hear about, and having just finished it I have to affirm all of the praise it has been given. I used it as spiritual reading, reading and reflecting on a chapter or part of a chapter before going to bed. It works well for that, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself returning to it periodically. But I read With God in Russia first, and I really think that that’s the way to do it. The description of Fr. Ciszek’s experiences in He Leadeth Me are certainly hair-raising, but they don’t make the same impression as the more detailed descriptions in his first book. Consequently, I suspect it’s possible, while reading He Leadeth Me, to misunderstand just what it meant for Fr. Ciszek to trust in God so radically—to allow God to lead him through it.
Anyway, both are highly recommended.
Deathstalker Rebellion
This is the second book in Simon R. Green’s Deathstalker series. It’s not quite as much fun as the first book; it kind of creaks along in places, and there are even more wild improbabilities than in the first. For example, much of the action takes place on the factory world Technos IV. (Or was it Technos III?) The Empire is building a factory there to outfit the Imperial Navy with a new alien space drive that’s much faster than anything else available. But Technos has this weather problem: the summers are hotter than hell, the winters are colder than hell, the springs are wetter than hell (and all of the animal and plant life goes berserk), and the autumns are nice only by comparison. Oh, and each season is only Two Days Long.
Technos wasn’t always like this—it seems that there’s a system of weather control satellites that were hacked by cyber-revolutionaries, causing the extreme weather patterns. Two hundred years ago.
This is what they call a Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot plot development.
- Couldn’t the weather control satellites have been fixed by now?
- Failing that, wouldn’t simply blowing them out of the sky yield improvements to the weather?
- It’s a big Empire—aren’t there better places to build a factory upon which the survival of the Empire might depend?
Now, the whole series is kind of spoofy; it’s meant to over the top and farcical in places, but the problem is that Green also tries to insert a little serious character development here and there, and the serious bits and the silly bits make for an uneasy brew.
All that said, I wasn’t expecting much of anything else; and there were some good bits too. Certainly, the book kept me reading.
Deathstalker
Simon R. Green’s Deathstalker is the first in a lengthy series of very thick space operas, and it’s the first of his books I’ve read after his Eddie Drood that really succeeds on its own terms–which, admittedly, are improbable, highly-colored, action-packed, and loaded with mayhem.
Owen Deathstalker is the lord of the House of Deathstalker, one of the oldest houses in the galactic Empire. The Deathstalkers have traditionally been great warriors, and Owen has been competently trained; but after his father’s death as the result of endless intrigues, Owen hunkers down in his Standing on Virimonde and studies history in between dallying with his concubine. And then Empress Lionstone XIV declares him an outlaw, for no particular reason that’s ever explained, and every man’s hand is turned against him. And every woman’s: the book opens with his concubine’s attempt to kill him and claim the bounty.
The book is full of all manner of things, including alien killing machines, gladiators, a plethora of engineered soldiers of various types, love, hate, betrayal, and a device that can blot out a thousand suns…and possibly bring them back. There are lost cities, warriors lost in time, clones, espers, elves (the members of ELF, the Esper Liberation Front). And there are a variety of surprisingly complex characters given the genre. Green’s not Bujold, by any stretch (but who is?) and he doesn’t have the delightful goofiness of Brian Daley’s Hobart Floyt and Alacrity FitzHugh books, but Deathstalker is a lot of fun, and I’ve already picked up the next two books in the series.
A side note; those who don’t share my interest in religion can skip it.
I begin to think that Green is not only a Christian, but possibly a Roman Catholic as well. Religion appears in this book only twice. First, a wedding between two Great Houses is presided over by the Vicar of the Church of Christ the Warrior. The Empress favors this Church, which has thereby become something like the official church of the Empire; and let me just say, it gives a new stridency to the term Church Militant. It is described in terms which make it appear to be a descendant of the Roman Catholic Church we know, but the Vicar is anything but the Servant of the Servants of God. Not a sexual predator, as clergy too often are in F&SF these days, but proud, haughty, ruthless, violent when crossed, and utterly lacking in any kind of charity. I thought, “Humph. Another bit of anti-Catholicism. Oh, well.” And yet, there’s that phrase, “Christ the Warrior”. This is clearly a new thing. And then, some time later, a man appears as a representative of the Church of Christ the Redeemer, and is instantly martyred.
The thing is, neither of these characters are really essential to the plot. Leaving them out would have shortened the book by maybe four or five pages, if that; and it’s a 523-page book. The Vicar is a character in an important scene, at least; the martyr could have been left out and not missed. My conjecture is that by putting him in, Green’s attempting to play fair, to say, “Yes, I know the Church of Christ the Warrior has made a mockery of Christ’s teaching.” Dunno. I’d ask him, but the only address I can find is a snail-mail address in England.
Hawk and Fisher
As part of my on-going investigation of Simon R. Green, I picked up an omnibus of three of his early novels, Swords of Haven. The three books are essentially police procedurals sent in a fantasy universe.
The setting is the city of Haven, a place that vaguely reminds me of Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar. The chief difference is that the city is governed by an elected council rather than a patrician. All three tales concern Hawk and Fisher, a husband-and-wife team, both captains in the City Guard. The feel is gritty and urban; think Victorian England with magic standing in for technology.
The first tale, Hawk and Fisher, is the least satisfying of the three. After a promising opening in which Hawk and Fisher find and put down a vampire that’s been terrorizing the city, it turns into a “country house” mystery (well, the house is in town, but “town house” mystery sounds silly) in which a candidate for the city council is murdered and one of his guests are responsible. Hawk and Fisher are on the scene, as they’ve been detailed to be the man’s body guards.
It’s a locked room mystery, and the gimmick—how the murder was done—is not bad. But I didn’t like the characterization, and I found my suspension of disbelief collapsing fairly often.
The second tale, Winner Take All, is better. It picks up shortly after Hawk and Fisher leaves off, when the duo are assigned to be body guards for yet another candidate. The election is imminent, and there’s a whole lot of full-body electioneering going on. By law, candidates are not allowed to have wizards on their staffs; but naturally enough, all of them do, complicating matters nicely.
The initial set up had me worried; it was a little too much like that of the previous book. And the characterization is still problematic; too many characters seem to do what they do because the plot demands it, rather than because it makes sense.
The third tale, The God Killer, is the most interesting. One of the features of Haven is the Street of Gods, where all of the city’s temples and churches are located. We first see the Street of Gods in passing in Winner Take All, but here it’s front and center. It’s the thing that most reminds me of Lankhmar, but Green’s Street of Gods is actually a more interesting place. First, the geography of the Street of Gods is variable; it’s as big as it needs to be to hold all of the temples, and its weather differs from that of the rest of the city. Second, the existence of the various gods is a material fact: they are magical “Beings” that feed on the worship of their followers and in return give them power. Those with many followers grow more powerful, and those with fewer fail and die; moreover they can be killed. Green’s basically following Terry Pratchett, which is amusing, as Terry Pratchett was himself following Fritz Leiber (Anhk-Morpork equals Lankhmar.)
But again, Green’s added a new twist. Hawk and Fisher are from another country, to the far north, and claim to have been raised as Christians. Moreover, as in Drinking Midnight Wine, the characters make a distinction between the Beings worshipped on the Street of Gods, and God who is the transcendent creator of all that is. (I’ve been unable to find anything on-line about Green’s religious beliefs, but I have to wonder if he’s a Christian.)
So, my overall assessment. Not bad; it’s been a rather fraught week, what with the Station Fire and all, and this book helped me pass the time pleasantly enough. The third novel in the set, at least, is genuinely interesting, and if Green still doesn’t strike me as a truly excellent writer, these were good enough that I’m willing to look up the remaining Hawk and Fisher novels (which are also available in an omnibus edition, Guards of Haven).
Drinking Midnight Wine
Simon R. Green has more faces than the village gossip. We know he’s not Jim Butcher; in Drinking Midnight Wine we find that he’s neither Neil Gaiman nor Charles de Lint, though not for lack of trying. I will say this for Green; he has guts. This is a more ambitious book than the others of his that I’ve read, and if he doesn’t quite pull it off there are nevertheless some good bits. There are also some truly awkward moments, some wooden expository speeches, and the occasional failed bit of comic relief. But I enjoyed it anyway.
It seems that there are two worlds, side-by-wide: Veritie and Mysterie. Veritie is our world; Mysterie is its magical twin. Normal humans live in Veritie; Power and Dominations and folks with a touch of magic live in Mysterie. Some few have a foot in both worlds.
Toby Dexter is a bookstore clerk who follows a beautiful woman through a door that wasn’t there before and finds that the world is far stranger than he had realized; and it’s up to him to keep it that way. More or less.
I’ve read a number of Green’s books now, and a number of them have this same feeling of being just a little more than he can handle; though it would appear that he can handle more now than he used to. They also seem to be based on a reasonably consistent set of metaphysical assumptions, in that Green, like C.S. Lewis, distinguishes between the transcendent immaterial Creator of All That Is, i.e., God, and a variety of material or immaterial Gods who are incredibly powerful but can be slain. Most fantasy authors these days seem to stick with the latter and leave the former out.
Anyway, if you like the urban fantasy shtick, this is a fun little book, despite its flaws.
Eifelheim
I finished Michael Flynn’s Eifelheim a couple of days ago, in between checking the fire news on-line; I’d have read it long ago, based on all of the glowing reviews I’d seen, but I was waiting for it to come out in paperback.
The premise of Eifelheim is pretty nifty: what would happen if a party of extraterrestrials were “shipwrecked” in 14th Century Europe? Would they be hailed as demons? Would there be mobs with pitchforks and torches? Or would they, just maybe, be seen as oddly shaped men? Flynn chooses the latter course, and justifiably in my view. In my pursuit of St. Thomas Aquinas I’ve been getting an education in how the Medievals thought, and so far as I can tell Flynn absolutely nails it.
According to the Medievals, a man is a rational animal: an animal distinguished from other animals by being rational. And this was seen as the way in which Man is made in God’s image: Man shares God’s rationality. Note that there’s nothing in this about shape: if the ETs were demonstrably rational, the learned of the time would have judged them to be men.
Remarkably, there is historical evidence for this. It was generally believed that all manner of odd creatures lived in distant lands, including the cynocephali, or “dog heads”. And the topic of whether the “dog heads” were rational animals, and hence men, was discussed. (Indeed, St. Augustine addressed the general question long before the Middle Ages.)
It’s amusing how little has changed. The Medievals like to hear stories about odd races living in far off lands, and so do we…it’s just that we’ve explored this planet so thoroughly that we have to put the far off lands in other solar systems.
But Eifelheim‘s not just an interesting thought experiment. As a detailed and accurate picture of Medieval life and thought, it shines a fascinating light on the usual run of “medieval” sword-and-sorcery novels. I like those, too; but few of them are anything at all like the real thing.
All that said, I didn’t cordially love Eifelheim. It’s mostly a tragedy, when all is said and done, and I’m not really into tragedy; and it’s a serious book, at a time when I was really in need of something lighter. But please note: I finished it anyway, and was glad to do so.
One thing I did love: Pastor Dietrich’s argument that the Krenkl were men rather than demons, done in the style of St. Thomas’ Summa Theologiae. I really have to hand it to Flynn. It’s one thing to research a subject well enough to fake it; it’s another to understand it. So far as I can tell, Flynn does.
Something From The Nightside
Something From The Nightside is the first book in another of Simon Green’s series. It seems that there’s a small area in the darkest heart of London that’s so given over to sin and debauchery that it’s become a pocket universe all of its own. It’s always 3 AM in the Nightside; life is cheap there, and anything else you can imagine (and things you should be glad you can’t) is available there for the right price.
John Taylor is a private investigator. He’s currently based in the more normal part of London, but he grew up in the Nightside, and when he’s there he access to certain….gifts. He can find pretty much anything, and as he says a few too many times, he has never made it a habit of carrying a gun—he’s never felt the need.
In short, we’ve got the occult private eye shtick going on here; yes, we’re firmly into Harry Dresden territory. Problem is, Simon Green’s no Jim Butcher. I found the book mildly entertaining, but not particularly memorable, and considerably more lightweight than Green’s The Man with the Golden Torc (which is fairly light and frothy to begin with).
I picked this up because I enjoyed Green’s Eddie Drood books; but if I’d started with this one I might not have gotten any farther. On the other hand, I might pick up the next in the series some day when I’m looking for some really light reading.
Does a Story Require Conflict?
Julie’s gotten involved in a discussion of whether conflict is required in a story. The guy she’s talking with seems to think of conflict as overt physical action (so far as I can tell from the excerpt Julie posted). The majority of books I read would contain conflict under that definition; but then, what about, say, Jane Austen? Pride and Prejudice contains all kinds of conflict, starting with the clash between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy; but it isn’t physical.
Anyway, go take a look.
The View from the Foothills 